Sessile Hush
by crackinthecup
Summary: 'In the dark Melkor breathed like a leviathan of star-fury and stone, yet leviathans bear the weight of things forgotten upon their shoulders.' Angbang.


**A/N:** Title plucked out of _It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens_ by W. H. Auden.

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Shadows lengthened as the fire in the hearth blazed ever lower with the steady churn of hours. They floated past as unheeded as dead bodies rushing upon plumed waves—unmarked save for the soft scratch of quill against parchment. Slowly, in infinitesimal wisps, their burden encroached upon Mairon until he paused with a flicker of a wince, fitting his quill alongside the edge of his report in a meticulously parallel match. Absently he rotated his wrist, eliciting a sharp click of bone that hooked a whine out of the wolf half-draped across his lap; but the sound did not seem to register as he continued to scan the page before him.

A tiny corrugation deepened between his eyebrows, and deftly he picked up the quill, dipping it into the inkpot, and deftly still he crossed out his own annotation: his experiment had run as smoothly as he had known it would—the melting point of his latest metal alloy would now withstand even the hottest wrath of his master's Fire-drakes; yet the numbers whirled through his mind and in their wake potential, improvement, _innovation_ brimmed; surely there would be techniques to refine the metal further, to ratchet up the temperature a notch or two higher, and if there were any, he would unearth them.

The tips of his hair rustled across the parchment as he bent low over his work; but then his calculations blurred into nondescript smears of ink as a thought spiked into his mind, spilling with the taste of wax poured bubbling over living flesh, of skin torn from bone in one savage rip. The quill rolled from his fingertips, and as his world imploded into the throb spearing beneath his skull, Mairon did nothing to stop the drizzle of ink over page and desk alike. Not frequent were such occurrences, and the Maia tentatively tapped into the mental link threaded between him and his master—only to recoil with searing dots of light flashing behind his eyelids. His wolf growled its disgruntlement, curling upon the floor instead, as Mairon scraped his chair back and clawed himself upon legs numbed by hours spent motionless at his desk.

Melkor's quarters had never seemed quite so distant from his own. He sped along corridors sessile in their quiescence, a glow and a rush past torches shrugging their fitful confusion to the echo of his footsteps. Slight hesitation reined him into a halt just outside his master's door, but with celerity he brushed its queer twinge aside: surely the matter at hand was of the utmost urgency. All the same, he inched the door open but slowly, with a question fluttering upon his lips; but darkness plucked the syllables from him—he had seen shadows, he had wielded them even, yet the blackness here cast unyielding tendrils about him and reeled him in; it had engulfed everything, or perhaps nothing had existed outside its walls in the first place; nothing but the Silmarils, seemingly ruptured from the veils of the world, burning upon the floor within the jaws of the iron crown.

Yet Mairon had lived through darkness more ravenous still. The thud of the closing door died before it had even drawn breath. A few rapid blinks sharpened Mairon's vision into shapes—dull, twisting ephemeral as smoke, yet better than a paperweight for securing the reality of the situation. His master loomed out of sightlessness as an iceberg might upon misty seas; he emerged along with the décor, a hulking shape leaning against the dining table, one blackened hand clamped to the wooden edge—staring at the jewels with all the turmoil of raging wind.

It was lucky that Mairon had no need of words to usher in comprehension, for the Vala offered none. Understanding whooshed in with a tottering inhalation: an ache that tunneled into bone marrow, creaking ever shriller with the turn of each millennium; an ache that resonated of the breaking of the world, of ash-choked volcanoes and blood-drunk soil; in the dark Melkor breathed like a leviathan of star-fury and stone, yet leviathans bear the weight of things forgotten upon their shoulders.

No syllable flitted from Mairon's lips. Without a sound he padded into the annulus of light bleeding from the Silmarils, crouching low to heft the crown. Although with utmost care he fitted his palms to iron alone, in scorching, unfurling heat the Silmarils pulsed through his fingertips. The Maia tightened his jaw, stoic and straight-spined he rose to make his way to his master; each day Melkor girded his temples with the crown, and without complaint Mairon would cradle its weight now, would clasp it all the firmer, even as his arms drooped with every twitch of movement that added to its colossal heaviness, even as the hallowed light blistered like inferno over his skin.

The Vala offered no intimation of acknowledgment when his lieutenant settled neatly before him and with trembling arms slotted the crown upon his head. As a mountain Melkor stood, unshaken, rooted deep into the foundations of the earth; Mairon brushed reverence across his forehead, nestled awe behind his ear as he tucked away errant strands of hair.

The Maia drew back fractionally, and relief exploded within his chest, quaking along his sinews with such potency that faintness crashed through him; being rid of the burden of the crown felt like a breath of crisp air into cavernous lungs. He sought his master's gaze with an uplifting of mood he knew to be unwarranted; yet he found it stolen, devoured by shadow, as the Silmarils blazed on, implacable and condemnatory. Fingers dove for fingers instead, and if Mairon then swallowed a little too audibly, not a whisper was uttered of it. He pried his master's fingers off the edge of the table, and too fast, with too much concern, he threaded his own through them and squeezed warmth back into pond-cold flesh.

''My lord,'' he began but found no words to scrape together; with no recourse but the memory of what had once been soothing, he tightened his grasp until he could trace the outline of bone over the back of his master's hand. Melkor said nothing; and whether he even looked at his lieutenant or no—who could tell? Within voracious, draining gloom he was woven, and there Mairon could not follow.

Instead he pulled his lord to him by the shoulders, tangling his fingers into the corded muscles of his back to bear some of the weight for him. The Vala did not return the embrace; his arms were stiffened driftwood at his sides, and the ghost of a sigh wound from his lips and was lost in the juncture between Mairon's neck and shoulder, in the quiver of the warm flesh there.

There were no voices; there was no motion. Eons might have wheeled past, in war and wrath and the frigid glister of uncaring stars. As ivy smothers a wall, so did Melkor's arms at last wind around his lieutenant's waist, slowly and imperceptibly and engendering no wish to stop their advance.

Mairon simply held on tighter.


End file.
